For Shame

"A Marshal of France," snapped Henri Philippe Petain at his judges more than a year ago, "begs nobody's mercy!" A solitary prisoner now in France's Ile d'Yeu Fortress, ten miles offshore in the Bay of Biscay, the 90-year-old ex-hero of Verdun is still as crusty as ever. In rugged health he spends his days pondering in justice in a large, whitewashed cell furnished with a metal army cot, a dresser, a wooden chair, a kerosene lamp and two clothes presses. Beneath his one barred window is a small round hole which the Marshal is convinced is a peephole. Last month Petain's jailer added a wicker lounge chair to the meager furnishings, but the prisoner refuses to sit in it. "It's furniture for old people," he snorts.

The ex-Chief of State makes his own bed daily, cleans his room by sprinkling disinfectant and wielding a broom in wide circles. Once a day his wife, who lives in a hotel some 15 minutes distant, visits him, bringing his washing and mending. Petain carefully folds his own shirts and stores them away in a closet. The rest of the time he spends studying English, reading or strolling, carefully guarded, in the courtyard. Occasionally he is permitted a visit from his attorney, Jacques Isorni.

"What has happened to De Gaulle anyway?" he asked the lawyer recently. "That interests me. I condemned him to death and he condemned me in turn. We are both condemned men." Over De Gaulle's resignation as President, he sniffed contemptuously: "I stayed on when the difficulties were harder to bear." De Gaulle, he insisted, "wants to play the part of Napoleon," but his reputation as a military strategist stems only from the fact that "he explained battles of mine so well."

The night before Isorni's last visit Petain felt stifled and decided that he was suffocating. Obsessed with the idea that he might die in the night with the record not yet set straight, he promptly penned a letter ordering his lawyer to demand a retrial. "I have never accepted my condemnation," he wrote. "I benefited from a grace I did not ask for." Next day he was as healthy as ever, but still sulking. "I was right all along [during the Vichy period]," he told Isorni. "I was more of a resister than anybody."

When his jailer (named Simon just like Louis XVI's) came in to tell him that some tomatoes which had long been ripening in the yard outside were at last growing red, the old Marshal turned on him. "Bah," he snapped, "they are blushing with shame."

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